Our two-day race marathon seminar is over, and what a two-day marathon it was. The eleven of us who took part managed to have a more or less constant 7+ hours of discussion on an ever-evolving though connected series of issues relating to race each of the past two days. The makeup of our group and selected readings ended up being strongly historically grounded, but given the importance of historical events and practices in shaping contemporary understandings and realities of race, that was not a bad thing. A more or less complete reading list is below:
- Shriver & Kittles (2004) “Genetic ancestry and the search for personalized genetic histories” Nature Reviews Genetics 5
- Bliss (2011) “Racial taxonomy in genomics” Social Science & Medicine 73
- Adams et al. (2008) “Beyond prejudice: Towards a sociocultural psychology of racism and oppression” from Commemorating Brown: The social psychology of racism and discrimination
- Kaiser et al. (2009) “The ironic consequences of Obama’s election: Decreased support for racial justice” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 45
- several readings and interview excerpts on the solidarity economy movement and non-capitalist economic systems
- excerpts from, Gilroy (1994) The Black Atlantic
- excerpts from, Perry (2011) More Beautiful and More Terrible: The embrace and transcendence of racial inequality in the United States
- excerpts from, Kennedy (2011) The persistence of the color line: Racial politics and the Obama presidency
- Hardimom (2009) “Wallis Simpson was wrong: remarks on Joshua Glasgow’s ‘A Theory of Race’ ” Symposia on Gender, Race and Philosophy 5
- Haslanger (2009) “Exploring race in life, in speech, and in philosophy: Commens on Josh Glasgow’s ‘A Theory of Race’ ” Symposia on Gender, Race and Philosophy 5
- Rockman (2006) “The unfree origins of American capitalism” in The Economy of Early America
- Thompson (2010) “Why Mass Incarceration Matters:Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History” The Journal of American History
- excerpts from, Romano & Raiford (2006) The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory
- excerpts from, Berger (2011) Seeing through race: A reinterpretation of civil rights photography
- Okihiro (1994) “Perils of the Body and Mind” in Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American history and culture
- Lye (2005) “A new deal for Asians: John Steinbeck, Carey McWilliams, and the liberalisms of Japanese-American internment” in America’s Asia: Racial form and American literature, 1893-1945
- Hsu (2009) “The end of White America?” The Atlantic
- Johnson (2010) Chapter 1, Pym
There is an awful lot to unpack in these readings and in the discussion we developed around them. The one issue I want to comment on later today is how massively constrained race is on a conceptual, historical, structural and personal level. The desire to move past racism is, in part, a desire to move past race. But the inability to escape the polyvalent reality of race and/or find alternative forms of categorical discourse and expression undercut that desire at seemingly every level.
